Stepparents are real parents

Does it really need to be said? You don’t have to be genetically related to your children to be a “real” parent.

Vice presidential candidate JD Vance seems to think differently. He spoke of Vice President Kamala Harris in an interview with Tucker Carlson in 2021 that was republished online earlier this week. It has racked up over 28 million views on X alone.

“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance said to Carlson. “It’s just a basic fact.” People like Kamala Harris, he said, have “no direct stake” in America.

Those of us with children not genetically related to us would like a word. So would cat lovers.

Vice President Harris actually is a mother — a stepmother, or “bonus mother,” if you prefer, to two children: Ella and Cole Emhoff. They call her “Momala.” When Ella graduated from college in 2021, Harris was there. When Cole was married in October, Harris officiated.

Ella, now 25, took to social media to defend her stepmom, saying “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I?” She told her biological mother, Kerstin Emhoff, “Say it louder for the people in the back.”

Kerstin Emhoff, ex-wife of Doug Emhoff, the current second gentleman, provided statements to news outlets saying, “These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

According to the latest research on Smart Stepfamilies, between 29 and 30 million stepparents exist in the U.S. today, parenting over 11 million children. If you take all “steprelationships” — parent, sibling or child — there are more than 113 million Americans with those relationships. There are an estimated additional 5 to 7 million people who have been adopted, like most of my children.

That’s a lot of people without genetic ties to their families.

You also don’t have to birth children to be eligible to be president of the United States. To date, no presidents have ever given birth. Additionally, five U.S. presidents did not have biological children: George Washington, James Polk, James Madison, James Buchanan and Andrew Jackson. Our first president, Washington, had no biological children, but, like Harris, was the stepparent to two children, and Andrew Jackson had one adopted child.

Vance continued with the Tucker Carlson interview, saying, “If we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, we should support more people who actually have kids. ... I mean, these people recognize that they’re unhappy. They’re living in one-bedroom apartments in New York City. They’ve played their entire lives to win a status game. They’re obsessed with their jobs,” he claimed, saying that they “hate normal Americans for choosing family.”

His comments are causing hurt and backlash in online communities. Meghan McCain, a conservative former host on “The View,” had several posts on X about the controversial comments. “One of my best friends did rounds and rounds of unsuccessful IVF wanting to have a child. It is still painful to talk about. This ‘childless women’ comment by JD Vance has made so many waves with so many different friends of mine for it’s insensitivity and cruelty to women,” read one post.

Another read: “I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know — these JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian. This is not who we are.”

The cat-lover crowd is motivated too, with multiple social media users pointing to the Time magazine cover of Taylor Swift with her cat draped around her shoulders and saying things like “The armageddon is coming for him” and “Vance attacked childless women who love cats. Taylor Swift would probably like a word.”

Trump lost women voters by 11 percentage points in 2020. No word on how the cat lover demographic voted.